Lighting

Doing some lighting in class today. We used a 3 spot lights for our setup. We could've used area lights instead but it would've come at the cost of a longer render time. I can see the benefit of using this lighting system instead of having to rely on physical sun and sky. Like having to create a night scene and such.
- Key light
- Fill light
- Rim light

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Learnt something very useful in maya from my lecturer today. I can crease the edges in smooth preview. This allows me to save poly count instead of wasting polys by adding in another edge loop. So Now I can be sure to use a combination of both techniques in the future.

Instead of creating a turntable under animate we just manually rotated the objects 360 degrees.

A render of the lighting.

I almost forgot to include saying that we got to do some image based lighting with a HDRI image.

Walk Cycle

So my lecturer checked out my attempt at a walk cycle. He only saw the first pass. He mentioned a few things that needs changing for my walk cycle.

-legs are too bent and too far forward
-need to check the first contact
-Wrists need to be floppier
-Shoulder line should mirror(reflect) the hip line
-Tilt torso forward
-Reference myself walking.

My lecturer also told me to reference Muybridge. I searched a couple of images and they look useful.

2nd Pass

Going through the 2nd pass on my female character though there are some things I need to change for the waiting on my character. I need to give her a more real animation But I'm not sure were the errors are.

Rigging issue

I personally wish I saw these little mistakes before animating. I either continue animating with this rigging issue or go back quite a couple of steps to fix it.

Container.

We were given a couple of days to work on this task given to us. Personally I wish I had a stronger work ethic cause I feel I could have done this task allot faster. Course I did hand in everything on Monday but it was at 8 pm when the dead line was at 5 pm. I learnt that even though you do have allot of potential whats most important is having a strong work ethic and there are always ways to improve your workflow and work ethic.

For this task we were using a new program called Crazy Bump for the first time. http://www.crazybump.com/ It's a really handy program. We simply used our AO bake to Generate an NRM map. Though working with low res I had to make some changes in photoshop to give a sharper contrast in lighting.

Refined walk sequence

There wasn't really anything new to learn at home from uni. At uni we only did one footstep which couldn't really go into a cycle. So at home I redid 1st, 2nd and 3rd passes. for the 3rd pass I just had the head bouncing, fingers relaxing(not so obvious), animted the shoulders and animated the toe movements.

When I was working on the 1st pass I was working in left view using this image as a guide for my walk sequence. I might use the same workflow for my character.

1st Pass

We were learning how to do animation in uni and I learned that there are 3 passes. The first pass is a very rigid blocking pass using stepped tangents. (Gif animations below.) Here for the first pass I keyed some of the controls at 3 frames apart and others I keyed 7 frames apart from each other to save time. cool thing is that I applied similar principles in my 2D animation class drawing at 2 frames apart but later when working on the second pass I can convert the stepped tangents to auto tangents.

Looking at the graph editor and seeing the stepped tangents for the foot controls. I can see how important it is to work in this workflow of going through 1st, 2nd and 3rd pass. Kinda like the modelling process from the basic blocking to the detailing.